HarperCollins is pround to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'My life looks as if it had been wasted for want of chances! When I see what you know, what you have read, and seen, and thought, I feel what a nothing I am!'...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. ‘Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.’ Beautiful, impulsive and spirited, Bathsheba Everdene's fortunes are changed forever when she inherits her own...

Today Thomas Hardy is best known for creating the great Wessex landscape as the backdrop to his rural stories, starting with Far from the Madding Crowd, and making them classics. But his true legacy is that of a progressive thinker. When he published...

A tale of love and loss - the first of Thomas Hardy's novels to win him widespread recognition and popularity - reissued to accompany a major motion picture due for release in May 2015. 'I shall do one thing in this life - one thing certain - that is...

Thomas Hardy's final novel Jude the Obscure explores notions of class, religion, marriage and modernization through its protagonist Jude Fawley, a working-class man who dreams of being a scholar. Provocative and daring for its day, the book was burnt...

When Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the d'Ubervilles was released it was regarded as quite racy - as it challenged the sexual values of the time. Follow the story of Tess as she discovers she is part of a noble Norman family, and is thrown into a life...

Tess is an innocent young girl until the day she goes to visit her rich 'apos;relatives'apos;, the D'apos;Urbervilles. Her encounter with her manipulative cousin, Alec, leads her onto a path that is beset with suffering and betrayal. When she falls...

Wessex Tales was the first collection of Hardy's short stories, and they reflect the experience of a novelist at the height of his powers. These seven tales, in which characters and scenes are imbued with a haunting realism, show considerable...

Gabriel Oaks observes Bathsheba Everdene, the young mistress of Weatherbury Farm, fall victim to bad decisions and romantic impulses, unaware of the stroke of fate that will finally bring about their union.

Before Grace Melbury went away to school, she was in love with Giles Winterborne, a simple woodsman in the forests of Blackmoore Vale. But Grace's schooling has given her a taste for refinement, and upon her return she finds herself drawn to a...

Hardy's 6th-published novel that follows a reddleman's experiences in a pagan heath, with Victorian plot and complications. Controversial for its time. 'This is the quality Hardy shares with the great writers...this setting behind the small action...

From the master of Victorian tragedy, the surprisingly comic adventures of a man caught between romance and religion. When young Mr. Stockdale arrives in a small village to fill in for the Methodist minister, he finds himself pining for his comely...

As popular today as they were during the author's lifetime, the works of Thomas Hardy captivate readers with their gripping narrative power and arresting imagery. This collection presents a trio of the author's finest and most representative short...

Hardy's first published work, Desperate Remedies moves the sensation novel into new territory. The compelling story and the machinations of the evil Aeneas Manston also raise the great questions underlying Hardy's major novels, and this edition shows...

Blue-eyed and high-spirited, Elfride Swancourt has little experience of the world beyond her remote parish, and becomes entangled with two men: the boyish architect, Stephen Smith, and the older literary man, Henry Knight. The former friends become...

The rambler who, for old association or other reasons, should trace the forsaken coach-road running almost in a meridional line from Bristol to the south shore of England, would find himself during the latter half of his journey in the vicinity of...

The following story, the first published by the author, was written nineteen years ago, at a time when he was feeling his way to a method. The principles observed in its composition are, no doubt, too exclusively those in which mystery, entanglement,...

'Yea, many there be that have run out of their wits for women, and become servants for their sakes. Many also have perished, have erred, and sinned, for women... O ye men, how can it be but women should be strong, seeing they do thus?'-ESDRAS.

The peninsula carved by Time out of a single stone, whereon most of the following scenes are laid, has been for centuries immemorial the home of a curious and well-nigh distinct people, cherishing strange beliefs and singular customs, now for the...

A tale of the Trumpet-Major, John Loveday, a soldier in the war with Buonaparte, and Robert, his brother, first mate in the Merchant Service. The present tale is founded more largely on testimony--oral and written--than any other in this series. The...

Thomas Hardy's novel The Woodlanders has been enjoyed by readers around the world for over 120 years. It is often cited as the beginning of Hardy's more controversial works, as its moral take on sexuality and marital fidelity challenged the norm.

The present tale is founded more largely on testimony-oral and written-than any other in this series. The external incidents which direct its course are mostly an unexaggerated reproduction of the recollections of old persons well known to the author...

Jocelyn Pierston, a sculptor of growing fame, is determined to find his ideal in womanhood, a quest that has led to many fruitless encounters. For just as it seems he has found his heart's desire, disillusionment sets in and his burning love turns to...

The changing of the old order in country manors and mansions may be slow or sudden, may have many issues romantic or otherwise, its romantic issues being not necessarily restricted to a change back to the original order; though this admissible...

This somewhat frivolous narrative was produced as an interlude between stories of a more sober design, and it was given the sub-title of a comedy to indicate-though not quite accurately-the aim of the performance. A high degree of probability was not...

One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot. They were plainly but not...

This slightly-built romance was the outcome of a wish to set the emotional history of two infinitesimal lives against the stupendous background of the stellar universe, and to impart to readers the sentiment that of these contrasting magnitudes the...

Hardy's The Withered Arm is a gothic tale of suspense and coincidence, and witchcraft. Hardy recalled a time when 'there was still living an old woman who, for the cure of some eating disease, had been taken in her youth to have her 'blood turned' by...

Thomas Hardy was part of the English naturalist movement. He wrote short stories, novels, and poetry. From the back cover of an earlier edition, 'Tess Durbeyfield is the daughter of a poor and dissipated villager, who learns that she may be...

Harper's said of Hardy that 'what is best in him we think is better than either George Eliot or Charles Reade; his portrayal of simple life and his love of nature are more intimate and perfect than hers, and his operation of the plot is never so open...

One of Thomas Hardy's novels set in a fictionalised rural southwest England. It follows the story of Michael Henchard, the Mayor of Casterbridge, who tries to hide his tragic past. Casterbridge is based on the real town of Dorchester in Dorset.